What Planet

by Miriam Gamble

Overview

The poems in Miriam Gamble’s third collection journey surreally through scenes and landscapes at once of the world and of the mind, finding little, as they go, that 'can be claimed self-evident'. By turns uncanny, dark, poignant and uproarious, What Planet sets the individuality of perception and the inventiveness of memory against fixed certainties, probing chaos and madness in a post-truth world. Rhythmically propulsive and dizzyingly inter-connective, Gamble’s new work is as formally adventurous as it is conceptually distinctive, stretching syntax, jumbling the solid and spectral, crossing borders of time and space. Yet this is also a collection pained by loss, and passionate to connect with a life’s 'vacated' corners – even if the act of remembering is as much creation as recovery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780374857
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	05/23/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	59
File size:	463 KB

About the Author

Miriam Gamble was born in Brussels in 1980 and grew up in Belfast. She studied at Oxford and at Queen’s University Belfast, where she completed a PhD in contemporary British and Irish poetry. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007, and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award in 2010. Her pamphlet, This Man's Town, was published by tall-lighthouse in 2007. Her first book-length collection, The Squirrels Are Dead, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2010 and won her a Somerset Maugham Award in 2011. Her second collection, Pirate Music, was published by Bloodaxe in 2014, and her third, What Planet, was published by Bloodaxe in 2019. She lectures in creative writing at Edinburgh University.

Table of Contents

The Landing Window Is Unspeakable 11

The Oak That Was Not There 12

Time Ball 13

Odradek Returns 14

Wonderland 15

Amethyst 16

Coda 17

Feria de Málaga 21

Leòdhasach 22

The Holy Host in Spanish Art 23

Gutties 24

Alchemist 25

Betty Staff's 26

Feldspar 28

Incident Report 30

The Wits 31

Oils of Sculptors Working 32

Crane Fly 35

Parotia Displaying in a Forest Clearing 36

Plume 37

Girl with Book and Rubber Bands 38

Bloater 40

Enkidu's Worm 41

Mare at Large 42

Credentials 43

Siete Lagunas 44

Kitten 45

Marine Snow 49

The Canal at Fountainbridge 50

Gardyloo 52

Little Monument: Se Vende 54

In Memoriam Your Stuff 55

Urn 56

Handwriting 57

Wormhole, Westlink 58

In the Annum 61

Abandoned Asylum 63

Sometimes Nothing 64

Winter Sunday 66

Holograph 67

Person 68

In the Recliner 70

Madeleine 71

IndyRef, 2014 72

Samhain 73

Moths 74

Notes 79